Becoming, part II

Becoming, part I 

I know, it's been a long long time since I posted the previous half of this history, this timeline of how I shed my social conditioning to become more or less comfortable in my own pervy skin. But I'm ready to continue now

A last note about books before I move along into other media: Nancy Friday's Women on Top. I have no idea what that book is about, right? But my mom bought it and she let me read it after she had. I kept it. I skipped over all the psychoanalysis of the fantasies right to the fantasies themselves. The ones I remember are the ones I read over and over. The only lines stuck in my head after all these years are these. "I longed to experience the ultimate, to be fucked in the ass," and later in that same fantasy, "I begged and pleaded to be left alone, that it hurt, but..." I don't remember the rest. I loved the begging and being ignored part.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired less than a month after I turned 17. I'd enjoyed the campy original movie, but this show was something else. The titles of these posts, I actually shamelessly lifted from Buffy.

I don't want to spoil any of you who haven't seen the show, but Buffy is this itty bitty slip of a girl who fights vampires as the Chosen One and struggles to have a somewhat normal social life. There are books of philosophy based on this show, and the entire show is brilliant (season one less so). If you haven't seen it, go, now. I'll wait.

There is vampire sex in Buffy, and there are Spike & Drusilla.

Season Two. Go watch. I'll wait.

Spike's an ass. But he's so solicitous of her, and she's so creepy-crazy, the way they move around each other, it made my 18-year-old pitter-patter go putt-putt. Still does.

Look at that photo. See that intensity? See how he touches her?

Fuck. Bloody good acting, says I.

I'm not one to swoon over actors or celebrities in general; I don't have a "list" of people who it would be okay to fuck. I have no desire to have sex with someone I don't know. What I did swoon over was that behavior, although not the homicidal asshole part. I still wasn't aware that this was an actual thing with a name, and not just my own extreme failure to be 'normal' and want 'normal' things.

I was 18, and I met my first boyfriend online. He lived roughly 14 hours' drive north of me, but we didn't ever do that drive. He was kind of an ass, but introduced me to the joys of netsex, which hell yeah I enjoyed. He never made specific time to see me, we'd just talk when he happened to be online, so I'd often wind up waiting for him for hours and hours. Oddly enough, that's probably how my relationship with my husband developed over time; he was often there, funny, sweet acquaintance, when jerkass was not.

During many of those waiting hours, unbearably horny, I started surfing the net for porn to read. Since rape and torture in the form it took in my romance novels were what had gotten me off since forever, I searched for stories of nonconsent. They very rarely actually did anything for me at the time, because so much of it ended with "Oh hahaha, you actually set all this up yourself after all."

Fuck that, wtf, I thought. What's the point? It's text. Why's everything got to be consensual at the end in text? So I found this long, rambling, multi-part story. Maybe you've heard of it.

Captured Caroline by Quin

I can't remember the name of the website where it was hosted, but I remember it had a old-fashioned style drawing of a sexy woman very tightly bound to a chair, that titillated and repulsed me at the same time. I wish I could see it again through the eyes of the person I am.

There's a part in the story somewhere, after much conflict, coercion, attempts to escape, punishment, raping, and talking, when he looks at her and he says "What are you?" and she responds "A slave for your pleasure, master."

I melted. I fucking melted. Biiig puddle of sexually aroused goo, me. I can't tell you where exactly that is because I last read this story fourteen fucking years ago. 


That's how much impact it had on me.

I know, I know, he beat her down into it, it's not as sexy as if she just gave it up on her own through wooing and courtship and her own decisions. I agree with you. But in my head at the time that's how it had to be, she had to be forced in order for her to be able to enjoy it. Clearly she wouldn't enjoy such a thing if he didn't force her, train her, make her like that. Right? Something was wrong with me to want to be her, right? RIGHT?

The guy in the story had all of this stuff. My mind boggled. He didn't make all of that stuff. Where did he get that stuff? The gags and chains and wrist cuffs with attachment points and bondage collars. Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Enter these bizarre initials. BDSM. Yeah, that was a category on one of the free porn sites, yep. So then I found Alice.

Yeah, that link drops you into the middle of a story. That's where I was dropped, except it was somewhere else, far away from anything resembling that sort of organization, and I had no link to the other parts. I was aroused though, and I checked that site every day (the links in each category were different stories every day) until the other Alice stories came around. In between I devoured every bit of BDSM text I could get my hands on. Some of it was truly excellent and some of it was extraordinarily mediocre.

My boyfriend at the time had no idea about any of this. Our regular netsex perhaps had a few more blowjobs, more random positions, and he expressed his delight at these things, but he didn't know. I didn't trust him enough to share that part of myself with him.

But that's another story.

That relationship ended in a spectacular display of nothing. We met, we fucked. He was an ass and stopped talking to me shortly afterward.

Enter my wonderful, fantastic husband, months later. After our initial meeting, spending most of every day in bed kissing and touching each other, I began to share bits of myself with him, what I still considered the darker bits, and he, being European, didn't seem to mind all that much or think I was all that weird. I was just me to him. Huh. How about that?

And so we embarked on this crazy kinky journey together... and here's where we are.

Oh, and yeah, there's a scene near the beginning of The Avengers that apparently made me make a little noise, according to husband. Didn't realize it myself.

Most definitely not 
The End....

Becoming, part I

As I get older, I find that I don't change so much as I become more myself. I shed layers of social conditioning that I never realized I could do without, and once I do, the result is far more "me" than what I was before.

My husband has played a large part in that, but he's not where it started.

The home I grew up in was loving, but extremely conservative. I was home schooled and my mom worked long hours. I spent a lot of time alone, but the time we spent as a family, my mom, her parents, and me, found a lot of talk about race and religion and choice and I was so often left with a bad taste in my mouth. In my young mind I thought that's just the way the world was, even though racism and fundamentalist Baptist teachings just made my mind boggle. I definitely developed my own opinions quite early, but I knew better than to sow dissent at home. I had to live there. My mom sympathized with me, and nurtured my having of opinions when we were alone, but she just wanted me to stay silent when we were in a family group. It made her life easier because her parents would light into her if they thought she was raising a liberal.

I discovered Star Trek at 13, and my jaw hung open. These folks. They supported each other, they believed in each other, they didn't care what color anyone was, and the Vulcans. IDIC, oh, yes, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations changed my life. The way it was in my house wasn't just The Way, it was A Way, and not a very good one. Oh, wow. First epiphany. Star Trek led me to every other kind of science fiction, TV and books and to the X-Men comics and the entire world opened up. The X-Men and their extreme diversity and sense of family despite all their differences wormed their way right into my little geek heart and my opinions got even stronger from this point. One layer of unnecessary junk away, and more "me" was left behind.

My grandmother was big on reading "little love stories," Harlequin romances, religious romance books, and chaste historical romances from Barbara Cartland. I read plenty of those too, but I always felt something was missing. I was about 13, yeah, around Star Trek discovery time, when I started wishing for more descriptive sex writing in those romances, and to please please please read a romance that my grandmother hadn't first verified as suitable for me. Any other book I could read! I read young adult novels and Elizabeth Goudge and Nancy Drew books by the armload from the library. So why not romance? What on earth could be so bad? I read Green Dolphin Street when I was 8; I was a clever girl. Books could only help me learn, right?

I spent a lot of time hanging out at a popular fast-food chain as a child, because my mom managed one in a bigger city an hour's drive away from our small town, and in order to spend a bit more time with me, she'd take me with her now and then. Once, her decision to take me with her was spur of the moment and I came with her unprepared. No book to read, no school work. She took me in to Wal-Mart to buy me a novel to read. I was still 13.

There it was, on the shelf. It called me, and even though it had been written 11 years earlier, it was sitting there for me.

Reviews for the book are mixed, but I am here to say it changed my life. Yes, the sex was written with flowery descriptions of manly members and womanly softness and so on, but there was sex. The sad sack lack of communication between the main characters doesn't recommend it, and Regan was a complete asshole.

And yet.

Sirena marries a horrible man while brokenhearted, and he does things to her. Perverted, sadistic things that were meant to solidify this man as the villain. And those things? Turned me on.

Turns out this book was the second of a series, and so I went and got the rest of them, one at a time, from bookstores.

Depravity abounded in the other books in the series as well. Evil smelly pirates, rape, a scene in which a young woman was forced to crawl around on the floor while the man she'd thought would be her loving husband kicked her and called her names and just generally left her an emotional wreck.

It was Very Bad Stuff, but it really aroused me. And here's the crux of the matter: I thought I was a Very Bad Person to be turned on by these things that were clearly meant to be Bad. I read them over and over. In my fantasies I'd stitch elements from different ones together and I'd be a happy, happy girl. I remember actually crawling around on my bedroom floor, playing that scene in my head.

It was okay to like that stuff, because in the fantasy I wasn't a party to it, it was forced on me. It was okay because it wasn't my idea. I wasn't a bad person, just an unfortunate victim of circumstances.

I started buying historical romances by the packing box full at library book sales. Tales of slavery and seduction and love and always, the dreadful communication between men and women which seems to be a staple of romance writing. The situations though, I found intoxicating, and the 'evil' parts especially so. The ones with actual slavery were especially fantastic for my needs.

These types of books had deals where you fill out a card, send it to start a subscription to the books, and you get a free box of four books and a glass. Yeah, I don't know why the glass. Then you pay for each monthly shipment of books after that. I would start the subscription with different publishers and cancel it after the second shipment, getting 8 books for the price of 4. I was young, I didn't have much money, you know. But one of those shipments contained this:

The book was interesting for me on a number of levels. The woman was married, and though the family had fallen into political disfavor, she had far more power than did the man, who was her slave. I learned a lot about history from historical romances, and this one definitely taught me a lot about ancient Rome.

Anyway, there's a scene in this book in which the lady and her slave-lover trade roles for the Saturnalia, and it. was. so. fucking. hot. That scene was my first indication that these things can be entered into by choice, and it can still be okay in the end. She gave him her power and for the duration of that scene, he dominated her, but didn't degrade her. He told her what to do and she did it and it was hot.

I had this indication, but I still had the niggling doubt that I was a Very Bad Person. I mean, slavery is BAD. Surely being turned on by someone having that kind of power over you is also BAD.

Anyone noticing that these first two stuck-in-my-mind books have the words "Captive" and "Bondage" right in their titles, amongst other books with names like The Raven and the Rose? I didn't at the time. I had just become a little more "me," though.


To be continued...